While narrative fracturing, multiplicity, and experimentalism are commonly associated with modernist and postmodern texts, they have largely been understudied in Victorian literature. Narrative Bonds: Multiple Narrators in the Victorian Novel focuses on the centrality of these elements and address the proliferation of multiple narrators in Victorian novels. In Narrative Bonds, Alexandra Valint explores the ways in which the Victorian multi-narrator form moves toward the unity of vision across characters and provides inclusivity in an era of expanding democratic rights and a growing middle class. Integrating narrative theory, gothic theory, and disability studies with analyses of works by Charles Dickens, Robert Louis Stevenson, Wilkie Collins, Emily Brontë, and Bram Stoker, this comprehensive and illuminating study illustrates the significance and impact of the multi-narrator structure in Victorian novels.

Alexandra Valint is Associate Professor in the English Program at the University of Southern Mississippi at the University of Southern Mississippi.

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction    Unity and Reliability in the Victorian Multinarrator Novel

Chapter 1        Epistles to Narratives to Monologues

Chapter 2        Depth and Surface: Back-and-Forth Narration and Embodiment in Bleak House

Chapter 3        The Quick Switch: The Child’s Resistance to Adulthood in Treasure Island

Chapter 4        Disability Aesthetics and Multinarration in Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White, The Moonstone, and The Legacy of Cain

Chapter 5        The Permeable Frame: Gothic Collaboration in Wuthering Heights

Epilogue          Returning and Nonreturning Multinarration in Dracula and The Beetle

Works Cited

Index